(Ways my claim could be false: there could have been way more than 150 rationalist meetups, so that these are lower than 2 std, or these could not have, at any point in their development, counted as rationalist meetups, or ziz, sam, and eliezer could have intended these outcomes, so these don’t count as failures)
I think of Ziz and co as less likely than 2std out, for about the reasons you give. I tend to give 200 as the rough number of organizers and groups, since I get a bit under that for ACX Everywhere meetups in a given season. If we’re asking per-event, Dirk’s ~5,000 number sounds low (off the top of my head, San Diego does frequent meetups but only the ACX Everywheres wind up on LessWrong, and there are others like that) but I’d believe 5,000~10,000.
You’re way off on the number of meetups. The LW events page has 4684 entries (kudos to Said for designing GreaterWrong such that one can simply adjust the URL to find this info). The number will be inflated by any duplicates or non-meetup events, of course, but it only goes back to 2018 and is thus missing the prior decade+ of events; accordingly, I think it’s reasonable to treat it as a lower bound.
fwiw, these are what I’d say a 2std failure case of a rationalist meetup looks like
https://www.wired.com/story/delirious-violent-impossible-true-story-zizians/
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/julia-garner-caroline-ellison-ftx-series-netflix-1236385385/
https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-the-optimist-open-ai-sam-altman/
(Ways my claim could be false: there could have been way more than 150 rationalist meetups, so that these are lower than 2 std, or these could not have, at any point in their development, counted as rationalist meetups, or ziz, sam, and eliezer could have intended these outcomes, so these don’t count as failures)
I think of Ziz and co as less likely than 2std out, for about the reasons you give. I tend to give 200 as the rough number of organizers and groups, since I get a bit under that for ACX Everywhere meetups in a given season. If we’re asking per-event, Dirk’s ~5,000 number sounds low (off the top of my head, San Diego does frequent meetups but only the ACX Everywheres wind up on LessWrong, and there are others like that) but I’d believe 5,000~10,000.
You’re way off on the number of meetups. The LW events page has 4684 entries (kudos to Said for designing GreaterWrong such that one can simply adjust the URL to find this info). The number will be inflated by any duplicates or non-meetup events, of course, but it only goes back to 2018 and is thus missing the prior decade+ of events; accordingly, I think it’s reasonable to treat it as a lower bound.